How to add widget locations to wordpress themes.

Widgets are part of the reason wordpress is so great. I've found that you can never have to many widget locations, and with some more advanced coding you can have customized widgets for each page or category in your blog. I originally wrote this article for my blog but figured I'd share it here too. The example I give will let you put a widget in your wordpress header

The first thing we need to do is register our new widget location. This is done by editing your themesfunctions.php file (or a custom-functions.php file if your theme supports it). In your wordpress administration area go to Appearance -> Editor. Then find the functions.php file over on the right, and add the following code:

Be sure you either add this at the very end of the functions.php file before the closing PHP tags, or at the very beginning after the opening PHP tags.

Code:

register_sidebar(array(
  'name' => 'Header',
  'id' => 'header',
  'before_widget' => '',
  'after_widget' => '',
  'before_title' => '<h3>',
  'after_title' => '</h3>'
));

This is a PHP function that will register the widget location to show up under the Appearance -> Widgets locations.

The ‘name’ field can be anything you want, but should be descriptive as this is what appears under your widgets menu. The ‘id’ must be unique and not contain any spaces. The ‘before_widget’ and ‘after_widget’ lets you insert any HTML code you want to display. The ‘before_title’ and ‘after_title’ lets you style the widget title.

The final step is to open your header.php file for editing and adding the following code to where you want your widget to appear.

Code:

<?php  dynamic_sidebar('header');  ?>

And that’s it! You’ve now got a widget in your WordPress header. This will make swapping blocks of content in and out easier for you.

This is awesome! I've been looking for something like that for quite some time I wanted to add something in the header because the header design I made is not that good looking and so I decided to add something nice there instead. Thank you very much for sharing this with us Great tutorial!

This is good information. However, like I mentioned somewhere else, I never write code when I can copy it. So what I do is use the Suffussion theme and I can add more widgets than I need. Including a few in the header, above the header and below the header.

There always are more widgets than you need If I used them all my website would be infinitely long and you'd have to scroll down for hours to find the footer

This is a good informational article and I am glad to see you contributing to writing articles for Top Admin. A good guide and I will be sure to use it if I need it.

Just thought of something. How about some screen shots so that we can actually see how it looks like on the Wordpress page? I, for one, am not good at visualizing some things.

This is great information! I was wondering how to go about doing this if/when I decided I needed more space for widgets; though, right now I think I'm good with the amount I have. Thanks for this, it'll come in handy!

Not a problem, Is there any way to edit the first post, I'd like to add a little more detail and screenshots?

You can only edit your post within a few minutes (60 I believe) of making the post, so no, you can't edit it. Sorry.